How to Find Customers on Twitter

The great thing about using Twitter for marketing is that you can reach customers in a whole new way. You can reach your customers right where they are, instead of advertising in places they’re likely to be. Twitter lets you create frequent content and get that content to your customers at all hours of the day, not once a month or only during special events.

If you want to build a following, you need to follow people first. But don’t just go following as many people as you can find. That approach works for spammers, but you’re better than that. You don’t want to go following everyone just in the hopes that he or she might buy something from you.

You want to follow the people who are likely to buy from you, people whom you think would be interested in what you have to say, and people you’re interested in. Find those people and have conversations with them. Talk about what interests them, send out links to articles that they may find useful, and retweet their articles.

Think of it this way: Have you ever had a friend who was involved in some multilevel marketing plan or sales club? Did he or she invite you to take a few minutes to find out a little bit more about the product or club? And did you feel like you at least owed your friend a few minutes?

Twitter is a lot like that, but without all the begrudging acceptance and feelings of guilt for saying no. Basically, if people like you because you’re a good twitizen (Twitter citizen), they’re more likely to pay attention to what you have to say when you send out a commercial message every now and then.

There are two great ways to find Twitter followers:

Searching by subject matter on Twitter: You can dig in three main places to unearth people to follow on Twitter: people’s tweets, people’s bios, and people’s locations. Based on tweets, you can establish an interest or a need from someone in a product or service that you offer.

Similarly, the bios of Twitter users may reveal whether they are part of the industry that you serve (or the industry that you are a part of). Ultimately, if you run a local business, knowing whether a Twitter user lives near you is critical. The following sections describe the ways to find people based on their tweets, their Twitter bio, and their location.

Finding followers by syncing your contact list: The best and easiest way to find people to follow is to start with the people you already know. Remember, you want to gather the people you initially know in order to build your Twitter followers. The best way to do this is to gather your contact lists, especially if you have them scattered around on different e-mail programs.

Unfortunately, you can’t upload contact files from your Outlook or other e-mail program into Twitter. However, if most of your e-mail addresses are in an e-mail program that sits on your hard drive, Twitter makes it easy to find out whether any of your contacts are already on Twitter.